My guess is the cfb books shy away from this sort of stuff because a.) they have ~150 more interesting teams to read up on than Coastal Carolina, and b.) spread estimation becomes a guess when one of the teams is not playing their hardest for the majority of the game. They essentially have to read Paterno’s mind as to when he’ll take the horses out and the variance is way too high there to make money reliably. As I remember Appalachian State didn’t receive a spread against Michigan last year, either.

More interesting is if the books discouraged setting lines on these games because of situations where the superior team’s head coach deliberately runs the score up, in an attempt to satisfy boosters who bet on the games. I’ve heard of both Tressel and Rodriguez cited for this sort of shady behavior before in more competitive games.

It’s hard enough to develop an expectation for a BCS v non-BCS school, there just aren’t enough common variables.

Final Score will be 41-14.
PSU will dominate the first half, entering halftime 35-0.
Then the 2nd and 3rd stringers will play for the 2nd half.
PSU will add on 6 more in the 2nd half, giving up 2 late BS touchdowns, probably through the air, which will make us all doubt our swiss cheese secondary going into next week against Oregon State.
At least this is how it plays out in my head, which is what I will believe since I will probably be too drunk to actually see what is happening on the field (or I’ll see the whole game in double vision – wow, are there 44 men on the field?)